Murgiwala
You do what you always do. Everyday. Unaware anyone would take special interest in it or in you. You choose a chicken. See them all fly and land, fly and land frantically. Clutching at the metal grate with yellow, flakey toes, pointed nails. Hoping it’s not their cage you open. One from the middle. You reach in and a storm of white feathers covers your hair and get stuck in your beard. You grip the chicken by its legs, place her against your chest, cradling her in the crook of your elbow and with the other arm smooth out her frightened feathers, standing on end. The feathers calm into soft slickness, and so does the chicken. It’s as calming for you as it is for her. She trusts you. And until, and even after, you slit her throat you care for her intently. Now you prepare her and yourself. This is your journey together, after all. Khuda gave you both life, gave you both sustenance, gave you both your time and you must honor the breath shared between you. You have the same mother. Siblings bound by earth that permanently stains both of your bare feet. You place her back in her cage and she understands. You tie a stained apron around your waist. You wash your hands, methodically, under Rihanna bhen’s null, whispering the fateha and looking down at your carefully cut nails that you scrub vigorously each night with an old toothbrush. You wipe the blade, set it on the small wooden lorry. You slowly draw her back out of the cage, wrap her in white cloth and extend her neck. Plucking clean the feathers on her neck. Bismillah irahmaan iraheem. A precise, quick incision. Blood drips down into the bucket you’ve placed below the counter. A jerk. A gargle. And her head loosens, submits, and a cloud dulls the bright black of her eyes. The next part is mechanical. A customer approaches you on the curb. You take an angled blade and ease off the feathers, plucking with expertise, moving against their lay. You wipe the bare, pink body with a damp cloth. You take what’s whole and undo it, to be sold off in limp, wet segments of a former self. You reach in and pull out the beating, the cleansing, the circulating parts, the working parts. The parts that helped her run, peck at seeds, make babies and warm them until hatching. The insides of her in your hands. You tug and carve until she’s hollow. Quick slices at the joints, between the breasts, thin alongside the ribs. They stand in the street as you work, fat and fluid dripping down to your elbows, watching you clean and discard, clean and discard. You pack a tight parcel of cellophane and they add it to their bag filled with namkeen and black market whiskey. You wash at stains in wood, in concrete, in flesh, as a ritual more than to forget blood. You put your topi on and push your lorry down the gully to your home, just in time for maghrib namaaz. You repeat this day 7,300 times. They call you Murgiwala.
* * *
Roadkill Altar
rust-red birds.
dug from clay
and cycled blood.
the color of
iron-rich cities
exhaled by trees.
the color of…
slashes in maps
by derelict diplomats.
made from the strut
of goats up
Jabal al-Madhbah.
dipped in tomorrow’s kill
and yesterday’s slaughter.
wings splayed and molting
ripe for Return
to earth
to tragedy
to unforeseen loss
to spilled guts
on the side of the road.
less pretty than the owl you
peeled off the highway asphalt
with all its feathers intact
and displayed between
crystals and candles.
The owl that sees beyond
the deceit and masks
of colonizers
and flew into headlights
anyway.
which is kinder:
an altar
or an open-air
slaughterhouse?
with the slow grind of nose
and beak back into gravel.
and a slit between
the Dead Sea and Gulf of Aqaba
that will never fill with water.
* * *
Worst Case Scenario
when the mourning doves
return without their babies
my mom accuses the air:
maybe they were eaten;
maybe they fell out of the nest
and couldn’t fly; maybe they
were crushed under
a calloused foot.
her imagination runs
only in one direction.
when I was a kid
it used to take me
two hours to eat dinner/
chase it in circles around
my plate. they would accuse
me with their forks:
lost to daydreams.
I think back then my dreams
were wide, liberating,
expansive; I think back
then I imagined strange
and delightful possibility.
my imagination ran
like spokes of a wheel
in all directions.
I see the way she watches
the world as if it’s
about to collapse, is
collapsing under her feet.
and her with no wings.
I close my eyes and watch
the backdrop of my mind:
jasmine bushes shrivel, sun
eclipses. and cycling are
a series of daymares. snapped
bones and collisions.
the mourning doves fly and land,
fly and land. peck at seeds
littering the ground, propelled
by their necks. chests puffed up
when they’re cold.
they glide low to the earth
to the tree across
the yard, their wings
fanned into a kaleidoscope
of white and gray.
and when I don’t
come to the window
they dream of me
hand in hand
with my mom
like a summer day.
* * *
Naazneen Diwan is a queer, Muslim poet and social justice educator. She is the current Lead Instructor for Baldwin House Urban Writing Residency hosted by Twelve Literary Arts in Cleveland, Ohio. She is an alumni of Art Omi writers’ residency and the founder of Kalaashakti healing arts and meditation workshops with Muslim women. Her poetry and prose have been published in several publications, including The Yale Review, Sky Island Journal, Cathexis Press, Serendipity Journal, Flypaper Magazine, Kohl, Project As[I]Am, SAMAR, and MOONROOT, and have been performed in venues such as Tuesday Night Cafe, The Japanese American National Museum in LA, Khmer Arts Academy, Other Books and The Last Bookstore. She is currently working on her first poetry manuscript, 99 Names.
